


if you would've told me how things are (i would've thought that we had won)

by peaksykid



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: (it's dark seattle it kind of comes with the territory), Dark Seattle, Gen, I promise you Arturo and Goodwin are mostly fine. beyond being uh. traumatized, Mind Control, Past Bad End, dark seattle however is not fine, flashbacks/PTSD, hey you guys know how there's lore floating around about arturo being from dark seattle, now you do.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 01:27:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29002200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peaksykid/pseuds/peaksykid
Summary: Goodwin Morin is used to half-recognizing faces from another time, another world.This time is different.//(we've known working in obscurity/and we'll know it again.)(you'd think it all turned out to be/like we plotted and schemed/why does it feel empty anyway?)
Relationships: Goodwin Morin & Arturo Huerta
Comments: 10
Kudos: 13





	if you would've told me how things are (i would've thought that we had won)

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, just a warning—already mentioned in the tags, but Dark Seattle / the Mirrorverse is a bad end dystopia type au. This fic deals with some heavy themes of that sort, as I said in the tags, and while Arturo and Goodwin both live to tell the tale, there is discussion of trauma from being there. Let me know if I need to add any further warnings, and I hope you all are doing well.

Goodwin is halfway down the hall before it hits her. She has  _ definitely _ seen that face before.

For once, it is different, than the usual recognition. She was used to flinching for a second on first glance at the rest of the Garages--the reflection, so close to the past, but different enough that there was no cold-blue-electric-connection made, and the lack of it jarring in and of itself. 

When they had pulled her out, she had screamed upon seeing all of them, until her mind had caught up with her, and she had recognized the slight differences--the red streaks in Malik’s hair, the figures who didn’t fit in the mix, the tall astronaut and the short figure with the electric silhouette. The sun,  _ setting _ , behind so many blessed clouds, at the edge of the stadium. It doesn’t bring her to panic, anymore, the visual comparison, but it still gives her pause, makes her heart jump in her throat enough that her arms put up a dark wall for a second between her and whoever’s face is blinking back at her like a funhouse painting with eyes that follow.

This isn’t that. This is actual, genuine recognition, and it is even weirder, because it’s--what was his name again?-- _ Arturo Huerta. _ Teddy had given her what he called the Arturo Talk, and she remembers it, or tries to, mind grasping to recall the words.

“ _ Yeah, Arturo’s a bit odd, but none of us mind. Kind of hard to describe. In the most literal way possible. I honestly recommend not trying, cause it’ll make your head hurt,” _ he had said, on the tour of the stadium he’d taken her on shortly after her momentous arrival. She had looked over to the space where he was gesturing, and she didn’t remember what she saw, other than that she understood that that was the person Teddy had been talking about.

Except she  _ recognizes _ him. She turns herself around, arms pivoting her by pushing against the wall, and stalks back down the hall, towards the instrument practice room with the door half-closed where she had heard Arturo call out a faint hello as he entered and she had passed him by.. An arm reaches out to push the door open, and she hears it clatter against the wall, from more force than she expected.

“Why are you here?” she hears herself say.

The figure inside--still, looking right at him, it is hard to even define what she is looking at, ringed-as-he-is in static and transparency--looks up at her.

_ “Hm?” _

It’s a soft sound, she hears it fine, but at the same time, it’s nearly inaudible.

“I said, why are you here?”

He sighs. Closes what she thinks is a book.

_ “Going to have to be a little more specific than that, my friend,”  _ he says, and there is static on the edge of his words, sizzling off like heat in summer.  _ “Though I think I can infer, you don’t mean this practice room.”  _ His form shifts, and she gets the sense that he is uncrossing his legs.

For a second, she really and truly cannot find the words. She isn’t sure if that’s because of Arturo-being-Arturo, or because of the rush and conglomeration of images she’s trying to string together in her mind’s eye, clumsily, like trying to make a wire hang in midair through the center of a hole, defying all gravity. She can see them better if she closes her eyes, and she risks doing so, clutching several fists as if physically holding on.

From the past: a colorful gig poster, of the sort she would shortly not see for years. Really, a combination gig-and-protest poster, fists raised in the air, some clutching weapons, others clutching drumsticks. A sharp graphic above, of the sun, (the sun Before) exploding in supernova, (it didn’t happen like that, in the end,) the Band, below, (it seemed wrong to even imagine them that jubilant, to imagine them crowing at the end of the world, with real-not-fake raucous smiles,) and their names, all written in script-graffiti style, below one of them, and she can’t remember the face,  _ Arturo Huerta _ . 

From the past: a rejoicing, celebration in the streets, illuminated, by the Sun, (or what was once the Sun) hanging, so strange, (before they all tired of the novelty) suspended in the air, pinned there, (she tries not to lose herself in the memory, of driving it through with the arrow, of seeing it bleed,) the Band, below, playing their hearts out, in joy, then, before it all went wrong; on the stage, halfway sitting on his vibraphone, so haphazard she had almost laughed, the figure she recognized from the poster and nothing else,  _ Arturo Huerta. _

From the past: a flickering drone camera feed on a screen, from high above the stadium, embattled and besieged, zooming in as far as it could go, and only from the corner of her eye did she see it as the Company associates pushed her down the hall to some cell or other to lock her away, and she fought back, kicking and screaming, before they closed the door--and she could hear, before they slammed it shut, the tinny sound of whatever song the Band, below, must be playing down there, (the last thing they would ever play,) the dull percussion of someone hitting the damn bars with mallets harder than you would ever think they could.

Then, shifting--her, below, lying on the ground, disoriented, blood seething-roiling with something blue-violet and reaching out wildly for something she didn’t yet know how to recognize, that was soon grasped and linked and  **_Connected_ ** as thirteen figures with bright-too-bright blue eyes and neat brown uniforms clustered around her prone form, all leaning in with strange smiles and hands too eager to help her up and claim her as one of their own, all leaning in close enough but not close enough to block the light of the Sun, and the sickly pallor of the great violet arrow driven through it, and the way it hung in the sky, so strange, suspended and pinned and never setting. They told her--one speaking in unison off-and-on with the other, enough that her new blood told her she too could predict the words--that she had been Reassigned here (the capitalization was implied, vocally, with a slight shift of the eyes) and that there had been a vacancy in their pitching lineup. They didn’t tell her who had left. In the chaos, she hadn’t thought to ask. 

She takes a breath, inhaling the dust of the practice room. She feels the shadows of her arms expand and widen behind her, filling up the negative space (it’s all negative space, to them) and boxing in the door, blocking the way. She can feel her fists, her real fists, forearms marked as they are with the faded tattoos, (they no longer glow, missed connection) contract and her nails dig into her palm.

“Here,” she says. The words still won’t come, only the repetition, the emphasis on a different word in the phrase. Again. Loop. “Why are you here.” Like a record, skipping.

She sees eyes widen, not the whole face. She thinks he might get what she’s talking about.

_ “Here,”  _ he mirrors, pauses.  _ “Instead of there?” _

Something in her chest deflates. She nods. She is so, so angry, and she cannot pin down why.

He sighs, but it’s strained.

_ “My friend, I think I could very well ask the same of you.” _

“I’m not your friend,” she spits out, both relishing in and horrified at her own bluntness. Tries to find more phrases to string together. Fumbles. “How--How did you get  _ out _ ? I thought I was the only one.”

The front legs of his chair hit the floor, and she realizes that he has been leaning back in it the whole time.

_ “There are ways,”  _ he says.  _ “Again, until very recently, I would have asked the same of you, and thought the same of myself.” _

“You can’t just--” Goodwin’s voice hitches. “You can’t just  _ say _ that. “There are ways…””

She struggles, again, to make the words leave her mouth.

“You got out and just left? That was it? Didn’t tell anyone? Didn’t take anyone with you?”

The anger is coming out now more than the words, and she is starting to have enough to understand what composes it.

“Didn’t look back for a fucking second, and see who was still left there?” 

She remembers clawing her way through the barrier, gum tacky under her fingernails and shadows dripping deep from her arms, and she remembers every hand she could imagine holding on, and every hand she wishes she could forget pulling her back. 

She isn’t remembering, now, she’s feeling, in real time, because Arturo has grabbed one of her arms and she can feel  _ his _ nails digging into her wrist cold and static and frantic-but-still and restrained. There’s a part of her that panics and she flips the wrist and grabs his too, they are clinging to one another’s forearms now, but it is not to hold close, it is to hold and not let the other escape notice.

She should be afraid, she thinks. She is and she isn’t.

_ “Were you there?”  _ he asks.

“Where?”

_ “The Last Gig.” _

It’s a phrase she’s not heard anyone say in a long time. No one spoke of it, there. It was unclear whether the Team themselves actually remembered it, and the rebels Goodwin ran with later, much later, never shared more details about the past than was necessary. She remembers being told that no recordings survived. She remembers a chill sinking down deep at the dawning realization.

She wasn’t there. At the time, she was still locked away, as were the others from the clan. It would take the Company a while to burn through the rest, careless and cruel, before they got to her, and longer still for an opening to suddenly appear on the Team, and for her handlers to tire of her, and throw her there. The gap between--between seeing the Band, wreathed in dead sunlight, and seeing the Team, leaning down and picking her up and feeling the tether in her blood pull taut--it was an eternity.

“No, I wasn’t,” she admits, and feels some measure of shame in her throat for her outburst, but not enough to make her let go of Arturo’s arm. She’s afraid that if she lets go, he won’t finish what he has to say.

_ “Then you can’t say anything,” _ he says.  _ “You don’t know what it was like.” _

She thinks about what the Sun’s blood felt like dripping down her neck. She thinks about the Shadows calling to her for the first time. She thinks she might understand, what Arturo means.

There is a silence. The humming and static underlay it.

Arturo continues, unprompted.

_ “We were going for days on end. At first it was just a siege. We’d made it through worse than a siege before. But we were used to battles, to all-out war, not defending the castle like this. We weren’t ready.” _

Goodwin feels his nails in her arm and she feels the thrumming of a guitar string beyond the aether somewhere.

_ “We were just stockpiling things at first, trying to make our own zone in the stadium. Then they set up the speakers.” _

A chill.

_ “It was steady at first, it was quiet, and we thought we could ignore it, but we caught each other falling in time with it. Like a metronome. I think that’s the closest I can describe it. We slowly came to understand what it was meant to do and I think they must’ve measured exactly how long it would take us to figure it out because the moment we did they cranked the volume.” _

The room feels like it is narrowing.

“Arturo, you don’t have to--”

_ “We started playing. Every song we knew. To drown it out. Covers, originals, shitty campfire songs you yell at sleepaway camp, whatever. Day and night. We did not stop. We did not stop. We did not stop. The sun never set. I don’t think we had realized yet that the sun really was never going to set again. The sun never set. We did not stop. Allison’s fingers bled. Jaylen tied herself to the barrier like it was going to stop her from falling. We did not stop. Monstera bashed his head against the drum to keep himself awake. Teddy’s voice was so raw. It started to trickle through, we felt something in us sync to it, and we had to keep playing. We had to keep playing. It was so hard, Goodwin.”  _

She can see him through the static outline now, and it feels wrong. She wants to look away, but she can’t. __

_ “They all fell, one by one. They couldn’t play forever. They were exhausted. We were exhausted. I was. I was. I was. I saw all of them on the ground and they did not get up again and when they did they were not the same as the ones who fell.” _

She can see them, so clearly. The deep indigo glow of their arrows. The cold shiver of their smiles. Beckoning her to catch up. She blinks and the image does not go away.

_ “But I didn’t fall. And I asked myself every day after why I didn’t fall. I still don’t know why, Goodwin. But I know that I was still myself enough to walk away and I did. And I knew it was all I could do. Do you really think I could have dragged any of them with me? Do you really think they would have listened? You know them, Goodwin. You know what strange things they are now.” _

“I do,” she says. Teeth gritted.

_ “But this is not about me. This is about you, is it not? Did you think you could take them with you? Did you think they would listen?”  _ The grip on her arm is tight and unyielding.

There are tears in her eyes now and they are black and heavy with shadow.

_ “Did you think you could have saved them?” _

“Stop it.”

_ “You asked me a question, so I get to ask you too. This is the balance of things.” _

She blots out the light, altogether, in the room, except for a thin shaft, to shine on him. “I said, stop.”

Again, a silence. Static. Absence. Void.

_ “Are we finished tormenting each other?” _

She pauses, still. “Are you?”

There is a nod. She reflects it back. 

She lets go of his arm, and he, hers.  


She steps back, drops the shadows away from the door, and realizes she has been shaking this whole time.

Turns away to go. Does not break eye contact, with what eyes she can determine are there.

“One last thing.”

The static is his only response.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone here?”

He laughs, a long, drawn out thing, that rumbles into the fading of the radio.

_ “My friend,”  _ he says, and she doesn’t jump to deny it, because it means something different than it did before.  _ “Do you really think anyone would have believed me? Or remembered long enough to decide whether they did?” _

She breathes in, still shaky. Takes one last look. Closes the door.

The nail marks still wreath the arrow on her natural pitching arm, a dark halo.

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of the stuff in this fic is inspired by and drawn from ideas that were generated during the Dark Seattle Lore Jam that the Garages server had. So, shoutouts to everyone who was there, and for letting this Tiger who likes dystopia stories too much hang out with you. Sorry for being so evil.
> 
> Title and description lyrics are from Serbia Drums, by !!! (Chk Chk Chk). It's a good song go listen to it.


End file.
